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Friday, March 20, 2009

DearREADERS,“The confusion about Charles’s vitals can be explained through the fact that the sources were created at different times by different people. The more time that has passed between the original event and the record of an event, the more likely there is to be an error.”

Now NONE of us have anything like misconstrued information about ancestors, do we?

If you’d like to follow along with the methodology of “how to do” family history research, you’ll want to check out www.findyourdead.com as they are currently discussing (with footnotes for references no less) how to determine more about a certain Mr. Scholefield -- the Charles mentioned in the quote above.

Ol’ Myrt here recently met with www.findyourdead.com researchers Arwen Newman and Sharon Scott at the 2009 Mesa Arizona Family History Expo, where they explained “We adopted the term "Cold Genealogy" from Donna Potter Phillips article in the December issue of Internet Genealogy. As a part of an advanced genealogy class, she assigned her students a randomly selected family from the 1930 Census to research. We have taken that idea of coming upon a family "cold," knowing nothing because they aren't even our own relatives, researching them, and then posting our results on our blog.”

Let’s hope these fine folks at www.findyourdead.com will “cold canvas” your ancestor and help you leap over brick walls in a single bound.

At the very least the rest of us will learn how to do a better job reasoning out the whys and wherefores of research methodology.